Dec 23, 2005

One Room School

National Public Radio recently revisited the One-Room School House (ref. Wiki). Emphasized in "Maine School Binds Isolated Island Together" is how a one-room school binds community on Monhegan Island (10 miles off the coast of Maine). To many of us these few remaining places are a legacy of a distant rural America (in 1919 there were reportedly 190K one-room schools, now barely 400). Undermined by modern transportation and the brutal efficiencies of consolidation, I wonder if they are worth noting here...

Reaching to the Monhegan Island illustration, are there examples in virtual worlds where 'education' coalesces communities? One possibility might be the "guild" and how in many online game worlds such serve as institutions of information sharing. Yes, related, Asheron's Call had a vassal system that claimed a mentoring dimension. I also hear the VATSIM (Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network) folks have established a testing process in their world.

However, what feels missing though in most of our game worlds is the need for a substantial partnering relationship: the chat channel seems sufficient a teacher.

What then about the in-world partnerships that do exist in MMOGs? Well, starting with this account of Irene Helmich's experiences teaching in a one room school:

Another way in which the teacher could make sure she had time for each class was by having older students act as teaching assistants for lower grades. After introducing a new lesson she could move on to the next class and let the some of the older students help the younger children with their questions. This not only helped the teacher be more efficient, but it also reinforced the lessons which older students had already learned and it gave younger students one-on-one attention.

What seems enriching from her example is how necessity can lead to a virtuous improvisation: individuals have to interconnect with other age groups to bootstrap an educational process. I have heard of this technique in other accounts of one-room schooling.

This feels antithetical to a core design principle for MMOGs where "levels" and the resulting artifacts such as "level banding" work to rank and stratify players in their world. I suspect this weakens the richness of social networks that form. Yes, there are good game design reasons for this. But then I muse, too bad about the game designs.

Comments

1.

I recently went on an instance run (Scarlet Monastery) in WoW with a new guild I had just joined. They were good people and I was one of the lower-level characters there -- also was clearly the n00b in terms of doing this particular instance. We had one level 60 guy and another level 55 or so character who led the party. Several othere with characters in the 40s helped them and helped the rest of us come along and not do anything too fatal.

The dynamic felt very much like one of teacher - student teacher - student that you describe from the old one room school house. Sure there was the fun of running through the instance, and we did get to fight various mobs, but everyone except the two leaders was there to learn too -- the idea being that at some point we'd each lead people through the area as they did.

I know this has sort of relationship has come up in sevaral games. Asheron's Call, as you mentioned, had it in name if nothing else, while WoW seems to have the substance but not any special provision for it.

It would be interesting -- probably edifying and profitable too -- to come up with other ways to more explicitly support master/teacher/mentor/docent/student/apprentice relationships by the way the world constructs and enables those roles, without having to explicitly name them (and thus take all the creativity and flexibility out of them).

In Dragonrealms, as it's a skill-based game (based on activity generating experience for a particular skill), there is a skill called Teaching which governs your ability to teach another character some particular skill. Most professions require a particular amount of this skill in order to level up, and the best teaching really comes from lots of low-level students.

Occasionally, also, younger players will ask advice of older players regarding spell choice or training habits, and I personally enjoy sharing everything I know about a particular spell so they can decide for themselves if they want it, or if they have it, how to use it.

For several examples of mentoring/learning in VWs - definitely worth reading Nicolas Ducheneaut and Robert Moore's “Gaining more than experience points: Learning social behavior in multiplayer computer games.” [link]. Constance has also written a couple interesting pieces that deal with learning/mentoring in VWs.

IIRC, one of the player goals in ATITD was (is?) to become a mentor - rewards dependent on the feedback of the person mentored.

Eve Online makes characters of much lower skill levels useful in PvP and other capacities to players who have more skills, which usually just means they're more able generalists with a circa 5% advantage and somewhat better equipment. New players can quickly become assets to corporations ingame under the guidance of older players, and I know of at least one corporation ('Eve University') set up specifically to recruit and educate newbies.

I'm slightly torn on the concept of levels themselves - I'm attracted to their simplicity, and the structure that they enable for players to follow, but at the same time they can readily be seen in many games to be very restrictive and artificial, both in reducing flexibility and player choice as well as making specialisation a somewhat silly concept while you generally follow a completely static archetype defined by the developers.

It seems wholy artificial that, say, a level 45 might be virtualy immune to the predations of well organised level 30s, but I think this is only partly the direct fault of having a level based system. A level based system encourages expectations of being significantly better at each level after you go *ding*, where I think skill based systems reduce this, since it's not such a simple matter to decide who *should* pwn the other person where differing skills might suggest that various tactics or situations might put the advantage in one court or another.

I'm not saying it's absolutely better, but I think that there is a lot to be said for there being good reasons for older players to benefit from supporting newer players, either directly or indirectly.